Comment on Anon crunches some numbers
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days agoI will spot you medical and bioscience, as that’s been an undiscovered country until fairly recently.
But when you compare the advent of plastics or even paper to modern carbon fiber, the progression of the latter is glacial by comparison and of relatively marginal benefit. Same with agriculture, which enjoyed a surge in productivity with modern fertilizer that’s never been matched. Or rocketry/telemetry, which began to plateau somewhere between Sputnik and Voyager.
That’s not to say we’re making no further progress. But every subsequent research step is taking more man-hours and materials than the last, while the benefits are comparatively slimmer. This is a second or first derivative decline, depending on how you want to measure things. But the promise that we’re just around the corner from a better mousetrap declines as we begin to run into the hard material limits of our universe.
The speed of light, Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant, the Boltsmann Constant - these are things we can know and apply. But they also represent a ceiling beyond which we can’t exceed. Whether you’re fabricating a microprocessor or launching a rocket ship, our material sciences are running into them all and forcing us to make economic trade-offs.
There’s no exponential growth to be found. Nothing comparable to what we enjoyed from the 19th to 20th centuries.
Just because computing tech has hit a temporary plateau, doesn’t mean that the rest of science has slowed down.
Computing is a notable example because we reached it so quickly, despite a certain optimism in the industry that lead to some very bad long term economic choices.
And advances in computing, coupled with the advent of AI, were supposed to be what got us to “The Singularity” which Sci-Fi nerds fantasized over without deeply interrogating the math of their predictions. The magical point at which we’d be post-scarcity, because computers were so advanced they’d take care of everything for us, is vaporware. It’s not real and never will be.
We aren’t racing towards a technological infiniti. We are exhausting a finite curve of possible discovery.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 2 days ago
Basically all of our technology it based on the manipulation of electromagnetism.
I doubt that possible discovery is exhausted at all, there are three other fundamental forces we don’t know how to manipulate yet.
Hell there may be fundamental forces we are as yet unaware of.
Other than nuclear power and weapons; which liberate energy from the weak force. We don’t use any other force directly.
At this stage, direct manipulation of the other fundamental forces, is science fiction. We don’t know how… yet.
Just to point out a, the first “modern” plastic, polystyrene, was discovered in 1839. The widespread use of plastics didn’t occur till the 1950’s…a full 110 years later. Carbon fibre was first developed in 1958, and is widely used today, less than 70 years later. I would say CF is more widely used today compared to plastics in the 1950’s.
If you look at the very first thing that could be called a plastic, you’d need to go back around a thousand years.
Don’t let perspective bias fool you, things are developing faster than ever.